Jess Cavalari (T/he/y)

My research and teaching interests lay in the overlap between histories of disease, medicine, and public health and global environmental history in Latin America and the Caribbean. My MA thesis examined English privateers as creators and circulators of scientific knowledge about the natural world between 1680 and 1720. My first research project at the PhD level took a digital historical approach to the study of the prescription records of a British colonial doctor working in Nevis in the 1880s, illuminating the global circulation of tropical medicaments and the micro politics of colonial public health in the Caribbean.

My dissertation research focuses on the colonial history of Panamá. I explore the mule trains that travelled on the colonial roads that were integral to the imperial networks of the global Spanish empire-- the Camino de Cruces and the Camino Real. Prior to the canal of the 20th century and the railroad of the 19th century, the Caminos, and the mule trains that travelled them, were the backbone of the Panamanian economy and a lynchpin of the burgeoning global imperial economy. This transportation network, or trajín, allowed for the imperial connection of the the Pacific and Atlantic worlds, and the formation of the first global maritime empire in human history. My dissertation probes into the social ecology of the trajín, and the environmental experiences of the transportation industry, especially the experiences of mules and the specialized enslaved African muleteers that drove them. My dissertation is the first in-depth examination of ecological and environmental aspects of the economy and society of the Panamanian trajín. The stories of the trajín illuminate the richness of colonial society in Panamá through an exploration of the lives and labor of the humans and non-humans alike.